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Are questions on alcohol beverages allowed?

The alcohol and bar-tending site is pretty far from coming to a beta, (please commit! http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/4141/bartending-and-alcoholic-beverages), so I wonder, could thing such as recipes and tips to prepare cocktails and such be allowed to be asked here?

I mean, in a way it is some sort of cooking,mixing and preparing edible things into 1 better tasting edible thing.

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  • hopefully this could also leverage on cooking's wider audience to raise awareness of the alcoholic drinks site, without losing viewers, since both are kind of complementary
    – Francisco Noriega
    Oct 19, 2010 at 0:05
  • I'm very much against the idea of slapping questions on one site just because there's a wider audience there; that's precisely what destroys so many communities and one of the reasons why SOFU/SE prospers (limited scope). That said, there's a case to be made that it's an aspect of serving food, and serving is a topic that's somewhere between accepted and grudgingly tolerated.
    – Aaronut
    Oct 19, 2010 at 2:47
  • See also: meta.cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/190/…
    – hobodave
    Oct 19, 2010 at 17:47

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A recipe request would obviously still be out of range.

In the past we've allowed questions on the canonical ratio for a drink, such as a margarita.

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  • Yes. Recipe requests are patently off-topic, whether it's a cocktail or not.
    – hobodave
    Oct 19, 2010 at 17:52
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I would not be entirely averse to this.

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While I agree that there are some strong similarities between preparing cocktails and cooking, I don't feel that having them on this site is going to benefit us. I know that on the cooking websites that I follow, all alcohol and brewing related articles get entirely ignored by me as I am not their target audience. When I need to pair food with alcohol I can, but it's just not an overriding passion of mine. That said, the real reasons that I think would be detrimental are as follows:

  1. Shared front page - I don't think that professional bartenders are going to want to wade through a front page full of cooking to get to the questions that interest them, and I know I don't want to do on the opposite case.

  2. Recipes are intergral to bartending - We have tried really hard to make sure that this site didn't become a recipe swap, and you can't talk bartending or cocktails without them. Just like baking, you work off a recipe in bartending and I don't see how you would avoid that.

  3. Increased noise - One of the things that makes the stack exchange system work so well is that it cuts down on the noise that forums and the like generate. Putting two subjects together in the same site is going to increase the noise level over all and make those little comment dustups happen a lot more frequently.

I'm sure that there are more and Im just as sure there are a few good reasons to do it, but this is what popped into my head.

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  • These were essentially my arguments ages ago; unfortunately it was one of the few debates that I essentially lost. That was back in our very early days when were still swamped with the programmer crowd, so public opinion may have changed since that time and I'm certainly not opposed to reopening the debate, but honestly I'm not expecting the tide to turn.
    – Aaronut
    Oct 19, 2010 at 2:43
  • I think, to expand on my answer above, there is a difference between 'how do I make a martini' and e.g. 'how do I thicken a martini so I can suspend encapsulated cucumber juice in a martini?' essentially the difference between classic cocktails, and how someone like Adria has reinvented them
    – daniel
    Oct 20, 2010 at 4:02
  • @daniel i agree, but how many times do you think that we are going to get questions of that caliber and additionally, how would that be cooking? I just don't see that we won't be just closing question after question for being a recipe requests... which would suck cause now that we're out of beta there are 13 people who can caste close votes and four of them are mods. Also, if there is interest in this, they already have a site proposal.
    – sarge_smith
    Oct 20, 2010 at 17:52
  • mmm, true. and there has been a marked uptick in recipe requests the last few days.
    – daniel
    Oct 20, 2010 at 21:50

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